SCENE IN TOKYO: Japanese Toy Store

SCENE IN TOKYO...wherein we sink teeth into a flaming cliché and fiddle around with homonyms and wordplay transitive to retelling our daily living, working, and existing as mostly sentient bipedal mammals, hive-minding about the big, big city...with video makers in our pockets!

SCENE:Japanese Toy Store (KIDDY LAND: HARAJUKU, TOKYO)The whole world has toys. Every culture. Every ethnicity. They entertain, of course, but they also socialize us, teach us, and inspire.

In one case close to home, there is a glaring correlation between the robot toys available from 1976-1990 and the 80,000 or so words one (to remain unnamed) superdorky AkihabaraNews editor has written on robotics over the past few years.

Over that same stretch of time, globalization through economic, intercultural, and information exchange has resulted in a whole lot of good things, but there's another -ion word that's always been a bit troubling: standardization. The unique, the unseen or unheard of, the exotic - less and less do these words apply to consumer goods of any kind. It's a price worth paying, but a price nonetheless.

That is to say, toys the world over have lost a bit of... variety. Here and there, however, bastions of uniqueness and originality remain: Japan is one.

Although this SCENE IN TOKYO does have some of the usual toy industry suspects, it's important to realize that several of them started here in Japan. Long before Michael Bay, and even before Hasbro's incarnation, Transformers were Takara Tomy's Microman and Diaclone, and Nintendo's Super Mario, long a global phenomenon, was first a game for Nintendo's Japan-only Famicom console. The uniqueness of Japanese culture is well represented in toys, so have a watch!

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